Free Thinking

Women 2020

Women represent just under half the global population and are the fastest growing group of consumers worldwide. Yet analyses of their role in society are often one-dimensional and linear. Usually, the examination focuses on how social and economic conditions exert changes on women’s roles and identities.

This paper inverts that perspective by exploring how women act as catalysts for fundamental changes, which are shaping not just their own world, but everybody’s world. We show that understanding women is important, both because they are potential new sources of growth, and because the changes in how women think and act have repercussions for their wider society and, by implication, for popular and consumer culture.